In a rod mill, especially in a high speed wire rod mill, the wire rod is normally fed to a laying head or cone in which the wire rod, coming from the earlier mill stages in a longitudinal direction, is deflected to form turns which are generally upright and are referred to as eye-vertical turns. The wire rod turns are then fed to a cooling station, generally on a conveyor which may be a belt or roller conveyor.
Downstream of the conveyor, the turns are gathered into a coil and the coils in readily transportable sizes, are tied or otherwise secured against spreading of the turns, stacked or otherwise stored or transported.
Because of the high wire rod speed in a high speed rod mill, the deflection of the wire rod at the end of the linear path from a horizontal travel to a vertical travel is practically impossible. As a consequence, in the laying head or cone, the wire rod is deflected into a succession of turns which are more or less upright as noted and at the output side of the laying head or cone, the eye-vertical or upright turns are laid down in horizontal turns which are horizontally fanned apart but nevertheless overlapped. That turn pattern is referred to as a spencerian coil. The wire rod in the spencerian coil can be cooled in an optimum manner. In the past, the system for spreading out the turns of coiled wire rod in a mill line has been characterized by a number of drawbacks or disadvantages and the high cost of the equipment provided therefore.
German open application 28 37 912 describes an apparatus for depositing and spreading wire rod turns on a transport conveyor which serves as a cooling stretch. The device comprises a conveyor which can be tilted upwardly at an upstream section and a laying cone which has its axis of rotation inclined at an acute angle to the horizontal. The tiltable first section of the transport conveyor which has a pivot axis located at a point spaced from the region in which the coil turns are deposited, enables variation of the height through which the turns from the laying cone can fall onto the conveyor. The laying cone has a laying pipe whose pitch can be altered to enable variation in the outlet speed of the turns which are formed and thus the characteristic of the ballistic laying curve. As a result of these features, the turns as they deposit upon the conveyor are tilted onto the latter free from any braking effect of the conveyor belt. It is, however, a disadvantage of this system for spreading and depositing the wire rod turns that the system is somewhat more complex to construct and more expensive to control if the characteristic of the ballistic laying curve of the turns is to be regulated.